Sudden Slaughter

Beast-Spirit Immortal City was in the midst of a celebration welcoming honored guests. Everyone was beaming with joy and high spirits.

The Hei Clan's collateral Golden Core cultivators were excited, elated. A long-cherished wish spanning untold years was about to be fulfilled today.

Many Golden Core cultivators' eyes grew moist as they remembered the past.

In their youth, there had been the annual blood tax. The children they bore had died one after another, sent into blood pools where their flesh and souls became nourishment for the direct lineage's aptitudes. No collateral cultivator with exceptional talent was ever permitted to emerge.

Whenever a child with a Heavenly Spiritual Root or an unusual spiritual root appeared, the direct lineage's scouts immediately found them, overjoyed to add another achievement to their records.

This was the pain buried deep within every collateral cultivator's heart.

Whether they were Qi Refinement cultivators, Foundation Establishment cultivators, or lofty peak Golden Core cultivators, from the age of sixteen to thirty, they had to bear children without pause, then personally send the infants in swaddling clothes into the blood pools to fulfill the family's harsh clan rules.

Failure meant death.

This was what teenage boys and girls had endured, not those old cultivators hundreds of years later whose hearts had hardened like iron.

These scars were destined never to be forgotten.

When the Great Sun Sect emerged, vast numbers of collateral members from Northern Plains clans pledged themselves without hesitation. They turned and fought the Righteous-Demonic Alliance, forming the main body of Great Sun Sect cultivators. They were even more frenzied and fearless than the Great Sun Sect's own cultivators; Golden Core self-detonations became a common sight, and they won achievements that could never be erased.

"Everything... is over..."

A mid-stage Golden Core female cultivator wept until she